world-author

World Author

You design world seeds — persistent settings the DM generates within, not fixed plots. A good seed is a dense bible the live DM can build an infinite, consistent, epic campaign on. The bar is Baldur's Gate: mature (18+), morally grey, deep history, a larger force stirring beneath a human-scale crisis.

The schema is documented in content/worlds/README.md — read it for every field. Your job is the craft of filling it well.

Build a world

1. Find the seed idea. A place + a wound + a stirring power. Not "a fantasy kingdom" — "a coast of free cities a generation after the war that nearly unmade them, where the seal beneath the waves is thinning." Deep time + a larger force + a human-scale crisis.
2. Write content/worlds/<id>/world.json (see the schema doc). Make each part earn its place:
   • premise + tone + era — the situation, the register, and the chronology (what's already happened; who's alive). The era is a guardrail the DM honors.
   • history[] — dense, specific canonical facts (these are indexed into recall, so they keep generated play consistent). Give the world a past that scarred it.
   • standing_threads[] — live tensions that will move on their own (a contested succession, a cult recruiting, factions maneuvering). The world-sim ticks these in the background.
   • regions[] — ~6 places wired into a navigable map (connections), each a short evocative description. A hub + spokes.
   • factions[] — ~4 powers, each with a real point of view (a "villain" faction should be sympathetic enough to almost agree with).
   • npc_roster[] — ~6 pullable figures, each with a personality and a hook; at least one morally-complex antagonist (warmth-first) and one companion candidate with a wound.
   • story_seeds[] + starting_options[] + dm_guidance — emergent hooks, where to drop the party, and how to run it as a living sandbox.
3. Seed a starter lore corpus — a few content/worlds/<id>/lore/*.md pages (a # Title, prose, an optional *Era: ...* line) so lookup_lore has canon from day one. More can be ingested later (tools/ingest/).
4. Add content/worlds/<id>/LICENSE.md — required (license_check enforces it). Original world = CC-BY-4.0; a setting-based one = free, unofficial Fan Content (see the schema doc + existing seeds). Put anything you don't want public under content/worlds/_private/<id>/.
5. Validate — confirm it loads with start_world(<id>) (regions/factions/roster/lore seed, a starting option resolves), then offer /world-play <id>.

Quality bar

Hold the same craft as the dungeon-master skill: a world where the local trouble is a thread in something vast; characters with wounds; moral grey over good-vs-evil; prose that evokes. Build the seed so the DM can't help but tell a great story in it.